Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  ‘Enlightenment: eighteenth-century intellectual movement, emphasised individual reason as opposed to faith. Faith in what exactly? It’s a rhetorical question, Martin. God, King, that sort of thing. Errm, in Science – Newton, gravity, the billiard-ball theory. In politics – the French Revolution, all men are created equal, life, liberty and so on. And what else?’

  Dirck raised his hand. Morris flinched.

  ‘Yes Dirck.’

  ‘If you are talking about Kant, that’s all wrong.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘If you’re talking about Kant, then everything you have said is wrong I think. Kant’s whole problematic involves saving faith from the onslaughts of dogmatic rationalism as exemplified by Liebnitz and Wolff. The second critique makes that quite clear, I believe. Incidentally, you may be using ‘reason’ as term a little sloppily. Kant is quite precise.’

  ‘I see.’ Morris ground his teeth. He was in a tight spot. Kant’s religious views were a complete mystery to him. ‘Yes, perhaps I was painting with rather a broad brush,’ he said, attempting a tactical retreat. ‘There are exceptions to every rule of course.’

  Dirck pointed to the list of names.

  ‘Every one of them believed in God.’

  Morris swallowed. He began to experience a strangely dispassionate curiosity as to how he would get out of this situation. In an hour or so it would be over, of course, but how exactly would he get from here to there? What would fill the intervening time? He noticed with equal detachment a gathering feeling of panic in his bowels and brain and the beginning of perspiration on his brow. He swallowed again and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Perhaps if he opened his mouth.

  ‘Uuuummmmmm … Errrr.’ He was touched by the curious, anticipatory way they were looking at him now (all except Dirck of course). They still believed in him, he could tell. They still thought he knew what he was talking about.

  ‘Well, I expect that’s a matter of opinion.’

  ‘Not really, I think it’s a matter of fact. Kant took communion every Sunday.’

  The looks of curiosity and anticipation were beginning to turn to frowns.

  ‘They all believed in God?’ The question was directed not to Morris but to Dirck.

  Dirck turned to face the questioner and smiled. ‘Yes, yes, of course. The task of Enlightenment is not to kill off God – that is Nietzche’s little job,’ he smirked, ‘but to reconcile his existence with Reason.’

  ‘Isn’t that impossible?’

  ‘Oh not at all, although it is a little tricky, ha, ha.’

  ‘But religious belief is irrational.’

  ‘Not exactly. Kant argues that we cannot know God – that’s the dogmatic position – but we can deduce his existence from the fact of our moral consciousness.’

  The other students looked blank and rather scared.

  ‘Moral consciousness?’ someone asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Dirck said. “Allow me to explain.” He walked over to the board and started writing. So this is how the hour would be passed, Morris thought: Dirck van Camper holding forth, the other students asking him questions, and Morris Gutman sitting silently at the front like a red-faced pillock. There probably were more degrading scenarios for a temporary lecturer, but he couldn’t immediately bring one to mind. While Dirck diagrammed the Kantian theory of knowledge, Morris imagined stabbing himself in the gut with a bread knife, deliberately impaling himself on a pitchfork, jumping on to iron railings from a first floor balcony.

  ‘You’ve misspelled cogitative,’ he shouted pathetically. Dirck was explaining the categorical imperative – we should act as if we wished everyone else to act the same way. What an appalling rule, Morris thought, what a grotesque burden to imagine yourself somehow responsible for the universe, but then again, that’s what parenthood was like. Every action becomes an example, every fart and blasphemy something to be copied and repeated back. Your life was no longer your own. Molly was building herself up out of bits of both of them – bits, often, that they had forgotten about or did not care to notice. He remembered her in bed that morning. ‘Go to Rotherham’ – it was what E said when their rows reached a certain point: ‘Go back to Rotherham, to your mother. Leave us both alone if you hate it so much.’ As he remembered such things, sadness enfolded Morris like a warm woolly blanket. He felt terribly tired.

  Some of the students were looking over at him – they looked concerned, sympathetic, confused. They knew that something wasn’t quite right and they wanted him, he realised, to retake control, to restore order and decorum, to put Dirck van Camper firmly back in his place. It was the same with Molly – if you rearranged the furniture or had your hair cut, she became upset. Conservatism in a way, but then again, there was safety in routine. He winked at them as if to suggest that he knew what he was doing, that it was all going to be OK.

  Then Morris looked at Dirck banging on about the difference between noumena and phenomena. He was wearing his trademark three-piece suit. Thin white lines of fluorescent light reflected off his shaven skull like minimalist horns, his rectangular lenses were tinted blue and looked like tiny Post-it notes attached to his eyebrows. He would be OK, Morris thought, whatever happened. That was the kind of person Dirck van Camper was. His self-belief was planetary, it drew things to him – the fellowship, Zoe Cable, the Crocodile, the ideas of Immanuel Kant, God knows what else – with the force of gravity. At that moment Morris felt for him a deep and complete loathing, a sense of hatred unmitigated for once by involuntary doubt, sympathy or moral qualm. If he could have pressed a button – he imagined a large, red button like an old person’s panic alarm – to eliminate Dirck van Camper from the earth, he would happily have done so.

  ‘Of course,’ Dirck said, ‘Kant makes the mistake of repeating (albeit in a very sophisticated way) that old Platonic distinction between the real and the apparent. Whereas Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and,’ he gestured vaguely, ‘many others remind us rightly that the apparent is the real.’

  ‘Oh, let’s have a bloody break,’ Morris announced rather more loudly than he meant to. It was only two thirty. ‘Twenty minutes.’

  Dirck looked offended. The others laughed. On the way out, they checked their text messages and asked each other for cigarettes or change. When they had gone, Morris rested his head on the formica desk. The double espresso had left him and he felt like his blood sugar had jumped off a cliff. As he closed his eyes the room began slowly to revolve.

  His mind slid down a coal-black chute into a paddling pool of anxious imagery. While his students sucked frappuccino in the refectory Morris, as he did almost every night, sat exams he had never revised for, performed plays he had never heard of, gave public lectures without notes. When he woke up it was five-thirty. His neck felt like it had been broken and badly reset, his shirt sleeve was soaked with drool and there were three notes by his elbow. One was from the class as a whole explaining that they had thought it better, under the circumstances, not to wake him but had gone instead to the Coal Bar to continue ‘discussions’ (Ha-Ha). The second was from Dirck van Camper, requesting a private meeting to discuss his concerns about the class, which so far he was finding, he found himself forced to admit, an acute disappointment. And the third, from Declan Monk, pointed out that he had been scheduled to teach in that room at five and reminded Morris that he was contractually obliged to inform the Head of Department of any medical or psychological ailments which might impair his professional performance.

  Chapter 7

  So that was that.

  E closed her eyes and sighed. The smell of the ladies’ was getting to her – apricot disinfectant, cigarette smoke, hairspray, poopoo (Molly’s vocabulary was infectious) and a cacophony of perfumes. She had always been sensitive to smell but this seemed worse than usual – was there a hint of onion in there? Someone’s lunch? She unspooled some toilet paper. What a day.

  Alison, the education curator, had overbooked the morning session. Two freelancers had cancelled, leaving a h
undred soggy kids loose in Coketown Art Gallery (home of the country’s finest collection of mid-Victorian pottery) with only her and two lackadaisical teachers to corral them. There had been something like a riot in the North Mezzanine. Someone had overturned the art cart. Misspelled obscenities had been pastelled onto the East Gallery walls. The attendants were understandably up in arms, and when Alison had deigned to appear after one of her pointless bloody meetings, instead of apologising for the mess she had had a stand-up row with the modern art curator then instructed E (it was beyond, far beyond annoying) that she should really be firmer with the attendants since it was their job to help not whinge.

  Then after lunch (the Bistro’s rather gruelling minestrone) Professor Urquhart from the Eccles Institute had phoned and requested a talk on surrealism for next Monday evening. The fact that Coketown Art Gallery housed no surrealist works and was closed on Monday evenings had not dissuaded him. After E had said no, he’d called Alison directly. Alison agreed to have the gallery opened specially, and suggested that E herself might give the talk – she had a degree in modern art after all, Alison explained, and seemed quite keen on all that. When E had pointed out that as an administrative assistant in the education department her job involved taking bookings, arranging workshops and endlessly faffing with brochures and publicity, but definitely not giving ad hoc lectures on surrealism, Alison had become very red in the face and started wobbling with anger.

  That was when E left. She couldn’t stand to be close to Alison when she started wobbling. It was unattractive and, since their office was the size of a telephone box, potentially dangerous. Soon though, she would have to go back and patch things up.

  E looked again at the thin blue line and checked the instructions. Positive. Her stomach rumbled. The first signs of intelligent (you hoped) life. A germ-sized blob making itself known. So thin. It struck her already as plaintive and yearning, like the miniaturised wail, a tiny bruise on the blotting paper. She wanted to look after it, fatten it up a bit. She could still smell her own urine, dark and tannic. Someone went into the next stall – Opium and Right Guard. That was that then. She was always faintly surprised when plans worked out – her plans anyway. The future was such a vast, howling darkness and making plans was like throwing yourself into it and expecting to be caught. Not that it never happened, but well, it was always a little disconcerting to be noticed like that, to be singled out.

  And Morris would have to be told.

  Why did she say it like that? Morris knew what they were doing after all. He was a full participant, at least after a drink or two. It was because she knew how his mind worked: another baby, another bloody ball to keep up in the air. It was arse backwards, but that was how he was at the moment – gloomy and rébarbative. He roared and sulked, and on the few occasions when he lapsed back into happiness he seemed afterwards to be actually ashamed of his recidivism. OK, there were reasons, a trail that could be followed: the Coketown job, his father’s death, the Bangor humiliation. But they were both nearly forty years old for Christsake, everyone was the same. Everyone had their list of woes and might-have-beens, their personal spaghetti junction of roads not taken. Wasn’t it a kind of arrogance to take one’s own sufferings quite so seriously? To imagine (as Morris with that look of grumpy, button-lipped hauteur surely did) that his were so much bigger and better than other people’s? She sighed at the uncharitable path her thoughts were taking. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as all that. Perhaps Morris’s character just needed a good yank and a twist and it would click back into place like a dislocated shoulder: he would become once again the intense and sexually enthusiastic man she had fallen in love with.

  Morris, of course, did not understand the secret of his own attractiveness. He imagined it had something to do with his being clever, whereas actually it was the opposite of that. Not that she would have wished him stupid, but Morris was most loveable in those rare moments when his brain failed him – she thought of Molly’s birth, his father’s death, certain exceptional hours of their honeymoon – moments when he seemed simply and charmingly flummoxed.

  A good yank and a twist, she thought again, perhaps that’s what he needs. Well that was what he was going to get whether he needed it or not.

  The woman next to her left the stall. E smelled soap. She looked again at the plastic stick, the blue line. It was out of their hands now anyway. There were other parties involved. When she stood up her head swam for a moment. She pulled up her knickers and smoothed her skirt. Leaving the stall felt like revisiting somewhere she had been to as a child. It was all – sinks, mirrors, soap dispensers, tampon machines – smaller, more fragile than it had seemed only twenty minutes before.

  Chapter 8

  Back in his office, Morris felt strangely alert – he had not had a nap for years. His professional future was of course a high price to pay for a few good hours, but there was no denying the splendid effects. It was as though the floral wallpaper of his mind had been stripped and replaced by something subtle, airy, off-white. He felt half-drunk with energy. He checked the time and then rang E to ask her to take Molly home on the bus. He wanted to stay for a while to work on his presentation. Then he sent two emails – a long, apologetic one to Declan Monk assuring him that his unexpected drowsiness was the result of the punishing research schedule which kept him awake regularly until dawn, rather than any mental or physical ailment, and a shorter one to his class hinting jovially that the incident had been the result of an excess of ‘larging’ the night before. He would, he thought, leave that arsehole Dirck van Camper for later. He got his dissertation manuscript out of a filing cabinet and began to skim it for anything useable.

  The dissertation entitled ‘Jam Tomorrow: Conserving Guilt in Arthur Alderley’ was based on Morris’s theory that Alderley’s notorious misanthropy and self-loathing, most notable perhaps in The City of Rats (1905), was a consequence not, as had been previously assumed, of his conviction and subsequent three-year imprisonment for shoplifting in 1902, but emerged instead from an incident some twelve years earlier at the family home in Whitstable, when the young Arthur accidentally upset a boiling pot of his mother’s gooseberry jam on to his younger brother Causley, causing such severe burns that Causley’s right leg was eventually amputated below the knee, blighting his hopes of a naval career and leading him eventually to a sad and inebriate death at thirty-two. It had been Morris’s contention that this incident, with its powerful associations of fruit and fratricide, had haunted Alderley throughout his life and was endlessly replayed in his novels.

  When he was working on the dissertation under Conrad Underseel’s supervision he had felt his ideas to be rather brilliant. He had anticipated that they would become known far beyond the admittedly fairly small and eccentric community of Alderley scholars; they might indeed, if he allowed himself to think that far ahead, serve as a model for a general revival of psycho-biographical criticism. Nowadays when he reread it, however, they struck him more often than not as forced and sophomoric. All that pedantic image spotting – every penknife, a scalpel, every bite of breakfast, a pot of gooseberry jam. Hopeless. Why had he wasted his time like that? It had been Underseel’s fault. He had flattered him and egged him on, persuaded him to work on Alderley when he hadn’t much wanted to; lured him with unpublished letters (little more than laundry lists) and offers of teaching (they came to nothing). Then, when Morris had completed on time, when Underseel had extracted the last drop of kudos from him (there was not much to extract but Underseel had supervised only one postgraduate in twelve years, he needed something) he dropped him.

  Underseel had refused him a reference. It had happened the day after Morris’s viva. Morris’s mood that morning had been understandably buoyant. As he made his way across the undulant and mismatched campus, he felt absurdly fond of it. The dank institutional odour of the Arts Building and the dark clatter of the corridor leading to Underseel’s office did not, for once, dishearten him but inspired instead a sense of warm nostalgia. As Mor
ris entered, Underseel had his back to the door. He was eating a chocolate biscuit and staring out of the window at the to and fro of the short-stay car park.

  ‘Ah, Morris, I’ve been expecting you,’ he said, without turning round. Morris could see the ragged ‘w’ where the back of Conrad’s toupee met his badly hennaed hair. Conrad Underseel was something of a drama queen but this was unusual even for him.

  ‘It’s about the Banbury job,’ said Morris.

  ‘Yes, yes, I saw it in the Guardian of course.’

  ‘I’m going to apply.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  There was a pause. Morris could hear the beep-beep of a lorry reversing and the chomp of Conrad’s dentures as he worked through his chocolate digestive.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you with that, Morris.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Conrad Underseel sighed and swivelled back round to face Morris.

  ‘Morris,’ he said, ‘you may think of me as a rather easygoing person, lackadaisical sometimes, devil-may-care.’ (Morris had never thought of him in this way.) ‘But actually,’ he pursed his lips and swallowed as though rather moved by what he was about to say, ‘I am a man of some principle. I believe in scholarship. Scholarship.’ When he said the word he made a gesture with his fingers and thumbs as though stretching a long piece of elastic.

  ‘Scholarship I define as the slow and methodical accumulation of knowledge.’ Morris nodded nervously. There was fear growing at the back of his mind which he dared not name.

  ‘These days, we have made speed our god, Morris – fast food, Kwik Save, rush hour, speed dial, express delivery, nought to sixty. Need I go on? But scholarship cannot be rushed. I trained, as you know, with Gaston Stichey at Cambridge. Stichey wrote only one book. It was a great book. It took him fifty years. He had no pride. May I explain why?’